Getting Started with Adobe Suite
The Adobe Suite can be very daunting at a first glance. Every program has their similarities, but are vastly different. Recently I had the opportunity to make a small project while trying out different programs. This was my experience.
Illustrator
In my opinion the easiest to use out of all the programs. Illustrator mainly work with vectors (think lines) instead of raster (think pixel) images. It’s very easy to navigate. For this project I made a low-poly image. I took an image of a squid and broke it up into sections. From there I colored them into similar color values. It ended up looking like this.
Photoshop
layers layers layers. This is the key to figuring out Photoshop. Photoshop is basically the opposite of Illustrator and is great for editing photos. For this project I decided to make a digital drawing of a junk ship. There are layers for the outlines, the color, and shadows. I split them all up so that I could edit them all individually to get a natural look.
Audacity (not Adobe)
Working with audio… ughh. Working with audio is hard because if anything is even slightly off we notice. For this project I worked to remove the vocals but keep the instruments in a track. This would’ve been alot easier if I had access to the original recordings (since a lot of the time things are recorded separately). However, since the instruments and the vocal tracks were already mixed I lost audio quality.
https://soundcloud.com/user-154112699/dont-look-back-removed-vocals
Premiere
I was really intimidated by Premiere at first. I dont consider myself good at recording or working with video at all. This manifest itself when I realized that all the video I shot was vertical instead of horizontal… I know… how embarrassing. Regardless here was the final video I edited with clips from a trip to the Pacific Northwest.
After Effects
After Effects is a whole different beast. With Illustrator there’s only 1 artboard to work with, and with After Effects there’s like 5. Animation requires a different mindset. The timing has to match up, and making something static look animated is no easy task. Although I only got a glimpse of After Effects, I could easily tell it has massive potential. I plan to work with it more
The Takeaway
I’m convinced that the Adobe Suite can help someone create any creative content they want. period. There’s so much I’ve been able to accomplish even with this little time working with it.
